This is another well written and fully comprehensive book by O'Reilly. I was very impressed by the excellent coverage and by the quality of the writing.One key feature of this book is that it goes welll beyond the basics, and well beyond the Microsoft documentation to explain not only how you do things, but why you do them. Each concept is put in context and illustrated with working code.The authors support this book well on the web, and full source code is available.In short, I was very impressed by this excellent book.

What can I say, their books are great. I've always found them to be the best out there.Although this is a reference, not a how-to, I had no problems with it as a beginner. With only this book and "Unix is a four letter word", I have had no trouble passing my unix class at school. Thats a heck of alot more than I can say for most reference books.

This is a gorgeous, full-color, masterfully laid-out piece of work by an author with cutting-edge understanding of Cascading Style Sheets and willingness to share his fine creative judgement. Yet it may take you a while to convince yourself (as it did me myself) that you need one more Eric Meyer CSS title. The glowing reviews finally broke through my resistance, and my facility with CSS has had several breakthroughs as a result.Like many of you, I already have Eric's two premier titles for guiding web transitions from the difficult world of patched-together HTML solutions to the powerful, systematic, maintenance-friendly potentials of CSS. Here's my experience so you can see if it matches yours. Through insightful and persuasive volumes such as Owen Briggs 'C S S: Separating Content from Presentation' (see reviews at ISBN 1904151043) I finally got that *aha* experience about CSS: These new standards are more than just style sheets, design aids, and download-enhancers; more even than the sum of these: once HTML 4 standards are better followed by browsers, CSS will open up all web-design work in remarkable ways. *HOWEVER*: design life in the meanwhile is extremely frustrating while browsers take their sweet time repairing past imbedded sins. As much as I wanted to break free from old HTML ways, the inconsistencies and vagaries of how browsers render CSS so discouraged me from solving design issues with CSS, that I considered taking a two year sabbatical from design until technology caught up. I thought I was just 'losing it' until I found Eric's own statement right on my desk in 'C S S: The Definitive Guide': "You may notice that, unlike other chapters, almost none of the figures in (the chapter on Positioning objects) was generated with a web browser. This is... a statement about the reliability and consistency of positioning implementations..." What's the average designer to do when even Jeffrey Zeldman admits (in his preface here) that his fallback position in the current world of CSS is *emailing Eric Meyer*? In this volume we see. Eric walks you through common types of design and redesign issues are solvable through CSS (and provides frequent color screen shots displaying exactly what happens after small changes in code). It is refreshing that so much care is taken with both the design and writing of this book. Even the *hints* in margins surprise me - after I thought I had read practically every CSS hint published to date. Eric puts them together in an engaging manner.No matter how skilled you are with design or with HTML, unless your mastery of CSS specifically is on a par with Eric's (all 3 or 4 of you such people), I think that after reading twenty pages of "Eric on CSS" you are likely to feel you wasted valuable time each week since this book's release! Thanks, Eric. Thanks, New Riders for the time and expense to make such a quality volume. Fine work on the companion web site and downloadable code as well!